In addition to working for the city, I hit the local nightclub scene, developing an interest in running my own joint.
I was spending a lot of time with my dad and my uncle, helping out a lot. I had ideas. For instance, why not take over a spot on Grand Avenue and put in an arcade? At the time, arcades were making a ton of legal money. Video games were just coming out. But my father would shoot down my ideas, so I kept them to myself. One day he said, “I don’t understand what the fuck’s going on with you. You had these great ideas. Now you’ve got no ideas or ambition.”
I wanted to say, “It’s not me, it’s you!” If my kid came to me, especially when he was nineteen years old, and wanted to start a business, I’d work with him and maybe put up the money. I’d want to see my son succeed. But it was always about him. So I backed off.
Back in the neighborhoods, the young Italians were still fighting one another. Different neighborhoods would hang out in the nightclubs where there would be matchups. Elmwood Park against Melrose Park, or Riis Park versus Taylor Street.
One club was the 1-2-3 on Diversey and Central in Chicago. In 1993, it became a Polish nightclub called the Jedynka Club. But back in early 1980s, when you walked in the door, the 1-2-3 was a cross between GoodFellas and Saturday Night Fever. The crowd was predominantly Italian, and every neighborhood had its section inside. The club owner would take a guy from each neighborhood and designate him as a bouncer. The guy would stand around with the people in his section, drink, and keep order.
The rule at 1-2-3 was that you couldn’t fight inside. When a section was ready to fight another group, everybody piled out into the street. Most Fridays, Diversey Avenue and Central Avenue traffic was blocked off because so many guys were hanging out and street fighting. Occasionally the Italians clashed with other races, especially when the North Austin district turned black. Sometimes it was the disco guys wearing leather jackets versus the rock guys with the long hair and biker look. Usually it was guys from different Italian neighborhoods fighting over a girl.
I wound up getting a weekend job at the 1-2-3 bouncing the Elmwood Park section. I was perfect for the job: tall and good at handling myself, and well respected in the neighborhood. The pay was fifty dollars a night, plus drinks. I didn’t tell my dad until one night when he asked me what I was up to. Then he told me, “Whattaya mean you’re fuckin’ workin’ security? I don’t want you to be no fuckin’ goon bouncer at some crazy place.” But eventually he agreed to let me earn the extra hundred dollars a week.
I got along with the guys from the club, and one day I was talking to my friend Johnny Galioto, who was James “Little Jimmy” Marcello’s nephew. Johnny was working the 1-2-3 as a bartender when he and I talked about starting our own club.
We had a lot of ideas about opening up a champagne room. There was a guy from the Patch who had a place called Sassafras and was looking for someone to reopen and run it. Johnny and I had a following. The guy came to us and asked if we’d be interested. We sat down and worked out a handshake deal. He gave us ten thousand dollars to fix up the club. We ordered drink inventory and had about four thousand or five thousand dollars left in the till. We got our friends together, glass etchers, electricians, builders, and carpenters. We fixed up the club and it was absolutely beautiful. We called it Frankie & Johnny’s. It was on Irving Park, just west of Harlem. This was 1984 and I was twenty-four years old. We were the first place in the city to feature a VIP champagne room. We had waitresses in sexy outfits. People loved it.
At first my dad gave me a hard time.
“Who the fuck are you, owning a nightclub?” To him, a nightclub was way too high-profile. Plus, if I began making money, he would feel that he had lost control of his son.
As much fun as I had running my own joint, it took its toll. I was working during the day for the city, running the club at night, and going out with my father and uncle on the crew. I was running around all the time, but I loved the idea of having a legit business. Not only was there prestige, but I had a feeling of accomplishment. And there were the beautiful girls. It was a business Johnny and I both enjoyed. We hired the best bartenders in the area.
After about a year, the owner, a guy nicknamed Poopsy, started getting uneasy. Poopsy ran a concession at city hall, which made lots of money. He wore black combat boots, a toupee, and a little hat. When he found out who Frankie and Johnny were related to, he feared the worst. But I was determined to keep the place afloat by being straight, since there was no paperwork verifying our arrangement with Poopsy.
One weekend, Johnny and I arrived at the club to find the locks changed and the doors padlocked. Somebody must have bent Poopsy’s ear, because he got scared. We sat down and pleaded with him.
“We’re running a legit business. We put in our time and haven’t taken a dime out of the business.”
But we knew the club was history. Poopsy wound up giving us the keys back. As soon as we got them back, we stole everything out of the joint. We carried out the liquor and sold it. We sold whatever we put into the place. Later we locked the doors behind us and never went back. Poopsy called, tossing around Joey Lombardo’s name to try and scare us into returning everything.
We told him, “Do what you have to, but are you sure Joey knows you’re using his name like that?”
My ace was that Lombardo senior was in jail at the time, and we knew that my dad and Johnny’s uncle, Little Jimmy Marcello, would back us.
Still in my early twenties, I returned to work at the 1-2-3 part-time, while Johnny opened a bar with his father on North Avenue. Then I left my job with the city and felt ready to work with the crew full-time. My dad was more than happy to expand my role in the family business.
Throughout the 1980s, under the noses of federal and local law enforcement, my father and his Chinatown crew ran wild. It was the climax of an era during which my father survived the Outfit’s changing leadership, starting in 1969 with hit man Milwaukee Phil Alderisio.
Next was the bloody decade-and-a-half (1971–86) reign of Joey “Doves” Aiuppa. Then came Sam “Wings” Carlisi in 1989. Throughout the 1980s, my father weathered numerous power plays between Angelo LaPietra and Turk Torello. My dad complained that Torello repeatedly snubbed the 26th Street/Chinatown crew because of Angelo when legit money opportunities—like owning legal OTB (off-track betting) parlors—became available to Outfit crews.
One constant remained. Whenever the boys on top needed someone eliminated, my father got his share of calls. He was respected and feared as an accomplished killer.
The June 1981 assassination of Michael Cagnoni in ritzy Hinsdale in DuPage County, twenty miles from downtown Chicago, is a case in point. Cagnoni was a successful entrepreneur in the refrigerated-trucking business who made sure his trucks crisscrossed the country fully loaded. As a result of his load efficiency, Cagnoni’s firm retained satisfied customers including the mob’s produce-hauling concerns. By maintaining high profitability in a tough business, Cagnoni offered lower rates, which caused competitors such as Flash Interstate, one of Cagnoni’s local subcontractors, to lower theirs.
Flash Interstate Trucking in Cicero was co-owned by mob bosses Joe Ferriola and Turk Torello. Located on South Laramie Avenue, Flash conveniently served as a clubhouse and rendezvous spot for organized crime figures like Rocky Infelise. According to one Flash insider, there was always one hundred thousand dollars in cash waiting in the safe to bankroll mob bookmaking or juice loan operations.
In the tradition of gangsters hiding “in plain sight,” Ferriola and Infelise often held their meetings both in the Flash parking lot and in an adjoining garage, out of earshot of FBI surveillance agents parked nearby. For over thirteen months, the FBI listened in via phone taps and monitored visitors. By mid-1981, the FBI was convinced that Flash was the site where many Outfit schemes and hits were hatched, during visits by Ferriola, Infelise, and a lineup of other gangsters and jewel thieves.
Cagnoni religiously paid his weekly street tax of two thousand
dollars in cash. He was often seen entering the Hyatt Hotel in Rosemont, where Joey Aiuppa would lunch. Cagnoni would go to the Flash office to drop off money. In return for his cash payments, Cagnoni’s operations ran free from labor problems.
When he realized that he could no longer justify the weekly cash outlay in case of an IRS audit, Cagnoni tried negotiating to make the payments some other way. He was willing to draw up contracts and continue making the payments by check. Ferriola and Infelise were inflexible and demanded cash. Ferriola had eyes to take over Cagnoni’s business, so when an exasperated Cagnoni stopped making payments, he hired a bodyguard, donned a flak jacket, and hoped for the best. While the FBI kept a watch on Flash Trucking, another surveillance unit placed John Fecarotta, Frank Santucci, and my father meeting together in a parking lot about a block from Cagnoni’s business.
Once Aiuppa pushed the button on Cagnoni it was up to my father and the crew to carry out the hit. For almost a year, Cagnoni was shadowed in and around his affluent west suburban Hinsdale home. Once the crew determined his daily routine, they elected to firebomb him. My dad tested different combinations of explosives, blasting caps, and remote firing devices to determine how close they needed to be to set off the fatal explosion in or around Cagnoni’s automobile. During the preparation stage, there were mishaps, including one ill-fated test that nearly took off my father’s hand.
After months of stalking, my father and Fecarotta settled on a plan. They inserted a brick-sized portion of malleable C-4 underneath Cagnoni’s silver 1978 Mercedes. Then they placed a transmitter inside an unattended car left in a restaurant parking lot next to the Ogden Avenue on-ramp, which Cagnoni habitually used to drive onto I-294. A remote car starter receiver was attached to the explosives under Cagnoni’s car either the night before or early in the morning. Inside the parked car, a K-40 antenna and the transmitter, modified to increase its range, emitted a continuous signal. The button on the transmitter was taped down under a block of wood. Once Cagnoni drove by, the receiver and the explosives in his car would set off a lethal blast.
Michael Cagnoni’s pending murder became a turning point for my uncle, as he harbored doubts about his role as the dependable cold-blooded killer. He was a family man with kids, and while staking out the Cagnoni residence one day, he watched in horror as Cagnoni’s wife, Margaret, started up the family Mercedes to take their young son, Michael junior, to school.
“This poor woman,” Uncle Nick later said, “got in the car. If she had come east and not west … I don’t know what …”
Had she driven by the engaged remote-control detonator, the device would have set off the C-4, instantly killing Cagnoni’s wife and child. After the close call, my uncle confronted my dad. Killing gangsters and shaking down businesses for Outfit money was one thing, but murdering innocent women and children was another.
My father responded angrily by smacking my uncle with his hand, fracturing his face, his psyche, and his allegiance to his older brother. This incident would prove to be the beginning of the end of their relationship.
Cagnoni later drove into the trap alone. One witness, James Mammina, testified that on June 24, 1981, while driving his Ford van, he saw Cagnoni’s Mercedes pull up in front of him and head toward the Tri-State Tollway at Ogden Avenue and I-294. He heard a loud explosion, saw a white flash, and felt a burst of heat through his windshield.
“The smoke cleared and I was able to see his vehicle, or what was left of it.”
In a grisly FBI photograph that no jury would see, human remains, mostly head and shoulders, are plopped in the middle of the I-294 on-ramp. Pieces of the luxury Mercedes-Benz were strewn everywhere, and from as far away as a quarter mile, birds came to feast on Cagnoni’s scattered body parts.
In the months that followed, more bodies were strewn in my father’s wake. Barely three months after the Cagnoni bombing, Nicholas D’Andrea, a lieutenant of Chicago Heights boss Al “Caesar” Tocco, was found in the trunk of a burning car in Crete, Illinois. D’Andrea was suspected of participating in the botched hit of Al Pilotto, whose day job was president of Local 5 of the Laborers’ International Union of North America. At night Al ran the gambling, prostitution, extortion, and juice business in the southern suburb Chicago Heights. As Pilotto was playing a round of golf, out of the bushes came a surprise visitor with a .22-caliber pistol. After a couple of misses and a nonfatal hit, the assailant ran off, missing his hole in one.
D’Andrea was quite the ladies’ man at age forty-two. He was courting his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, Terry. D’Andrea eventually married Terry and left her behind when he was dispatched by the mob’s trunk stuffers.
With the bombing death of Cagnoni accomplished, restaurant owner Nick Sarillo was the next victim when his blue Econoline cargo van suddenly exploded in April of 1982. According to court testimony, the blast “had something to do with gambling,” and it was alleged that Sarillo, a tough guy in his own right, refused to pay off Joe Amato, the designated leader of Outfit gambling interests in the northern suburbs. When the explosion occurred, Sarillo was driving in the village of Wauconda in Lake County, located on the far northeastern tip of Illinois. Sarillo was seriously injured and very sooty, but he miraculously survived Wile E. Coyote–style and remained silent. Since there was no room for the explosives under the driver’s seat, they were placed instead under the passenger’s side. The engine area between the driver and passenger sides deflected the blast, and the blowout backfired to the cargo portion of the van.
“He looked like a cartoon face, all in black,” recalled Chuck Fagan, a deputy for the Lake County Sheriff’s Office. “But when you try to talk to these fellas, it’s like talking to a wall. Even in all that pain and agony, they’ve got nothing to say.”
Years later, despite Sarillo’s silence, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms would link the characteristics of his bombing to Cagnoni’s, thanks to the identical brand of motherboard connected to the electronics and the modus operandi used to detonate the chunk of C-4 strategically placed under the seat of the van.
But it was the deaths of Richard Ortiz and Arthur Morawski in the summer of 1983, dubbed the “Half and Half Murders,” that would propel my father’s reputation as hit man du jour. Ortiz had drawn the ire of Johnny Apes, who was irritated by Ortiz’s drug deals and that Ortiz owed him money—whether from street tax or juice—and was ducking him. The Outfit also suspected that Ortiz had killed one of their own, Leo Manfredi, in a Cicero pizza parlor without authorization. This meant Ortiz had to go.
My father served as the maestro of Ortiz’s demise. On July 23, 1983, after pulling up in front of the His ’N’ Mine Lounge on Twenty-second Street in Cicero, he dispatched Uncle Nick and Jimmy DiForti, both carrying shotguns, to do the dirty work while he strategically parked his car diagonally, blocking any chance of escape. Arthur Morawski, it was later revealed, was an innocent victim who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had just hitched a ride home from the racetrack. A prime piece of evidence collected on the scene, a live shotgun shell, was found on the back passenger-side window of Ortiz’s car.
By the mid-1980s, the domestic landscape of the Calabrese home was dramatically changing. After nearly a dozen years with his mistress, Diane Cimino, on the side, my dad separated from and divorced my mom, or more accurately she divorced him. Dad married Diane at an intimate family gathering at Tony Spavone’s restaurant in Bloomington, Illinois, in early 1986.
I believe that my father manipulated my mom into divorcing him. He wore her down with his ways. Living in the Compound with his whole family, she’d had enough. Moving to a brand-new house in the affluent suburban village of Oak Brook with Diane, he found that transitioning his goomah-turned-wife into his sons’ stepmother wasn’t easy.
None of us wanted to meet her, but we were never comfortable telling my dad no. My youngest brother, Nicky, was just a teenager at the time, and he took the divorce badly. Dad called Nicky and me upstairs to talk about meeting Diane. Nicky w
ouldn’t answer. My dad kept pushing, but Nicky wouldn’t say anything. His eyes were full of tears. I wanted to butt in and tell my father to lay off him, that he was having a hard time with it.
Nicky yelled, “I don’t wanna meet Diane because I hate your fucking guts for what you did!”
My father lost it. He jumped up and whaled on Nicky, both hands flying, swinging and cracking him in the face. “You don’t fucking talk to me like that. I will kick your ass.”
It kills me that I didn’t protect my little brother.
After my dad moved out of the Elmwood Park Compound, he would occasionally show up for one of Mom’s home-cooked holiday meals. I would take my mother out every Christmas in my pickup truck to buy a Christmas tree. One year, with me in bed with the flu, my father happened by in a cheerful mood and volunteered to take Mom to get a tree if she agreed to make one of his favorite Italian chicken dishes. Kurt was enlisted to come along, although he had plans. My mother took a long time selecting the tree, and by the time they got back to the house, Dad was in a foul mood.
Kurt was pouting “with a puss on his face,” and as my father tried to straighten the tree in the stand, he erupted. He cracked Kurt in the head, knocking him and the tree to the floor, and stomped out, yelling, “Look what you made me do, asshole!”
After his honeymoon, he felt threatened by Diane’s close relationship with her father. Dominic Cimino was a retired police chief of Melrose Park and a war hero, and was well-liked around town. I was with my dad one night in Diane’s father’s garage. I could see that something was eating him and that he was hatching a plan—to lure Dominic into the garage and whack him.
I was speechless. I couldn’t believe it. Suddenly murder became the best way to solve a family problem. I no longer knew where he drew the line and whom he would or wouldn’t kill. He never whacked Dominic Cimino. In time, their relationship improved, and Cimino died from natural causes in 2008.
Operation Family Secrets: How a Mobster's Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago's Murderous Crime Family Page 7